And now came Tolstóy with _Anna Karénina_, which bears the menacing biblical epigraph: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay it,” and in which the biblical revenge falls upon the unfortunate Karénina, who puts an end by suicide to her sufferings after her separation from her husband. Russian critics evidently could not accept Tolstóy’s views. The case of Karénina was one of those where there could be no question of “vengeance.” She was married as a young girl to an old and unattractive man. At that time she did not know exactly what she was doing, and nobody had explained it to her. She had never known love, and learned it for the first time when she saw Vrónskiy. Deceit, for her, was absolutely out of the question; and to keep up a merely conventional marriage would have been a sacrifice which would not have made her husband and child any happier. Separation, and a new life with Vrónskiy, who seriously loved her, was the only possible outcome. At any rate, if the story of Anna Karénina had to end in tragedy, it was not in the least in consequence of an act of supreme justice. As always, the honest artistic genius of Tolstóy had itself indicated another cause--the real one. It was the inconsistency of Vrónskiy and Karénina. After having separated from her husband and defied “public opinion”--that is, the opinion of women who, as Tolstóy shows it himself, were not honest enough to be allowed any voice in the matter--neither she nor Vrónskiy had the courage of breaking entirely with that society, the futility of which Tolstóy knows and describes so exquisitely. Instead of that, when Anna returned with Vrónskiy to St. Petersburg, her own and Vrónskiy’s chief preoccupation was--How Betsey and other such women would receive her, if she made her appearance among them. And it was the opinion of the Betsies--surely not Superhuman Justice--which brought Karénina to suicide. RELIGIOUS CRISIS Everyone knows the profound change which took place in Tolstóy’s fundamental conceptions of life in the years 1875-1878, when he had reached the age of about fifty. I do not think that one has the right to discuss publicly what has been going on in the very depths of another’s mind; but, by telling us himself the inner drama and the struggles which he has lived through, the great writer has, so to say, invited us to verify whether he was correct in his reasonings and conclusions; and limiting ourselves to the psychological material which he has given us, we may discuss it without undue intrusion into the motives of his actions.